When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

Doctorow, Cory. "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth." Originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe in 2006.[1] Anthologized Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2007).[2]

Mentioned in Sandor Klapcsik's review of the anthology in SFRA Review #284 (Spring 2008): pp. 15-16, who finds it one of the anthologized works that "focus strongly on techno-geek culture."[3]

Reviewed by Alex Willging in his series on the Rewired stories, 28 August 2012. Willging find the protagonist "definitely not a classic cyberpunk hero"; instead

Felix Tremont is a systems administrator who gets called away at one in the morning to fix a crashed server for a financial company. However, he and the other sysadmins soon find themselves stuck at the office when a worldwide catastrophe strikes, a combination of bio- and cyberterrorism that wipes out thousands of human lives and crashes most of the civilized world. With his wife and newborn son gone, Felix is one of the surviving tech geeks responsible for maintaining the Internet – now a vital resource in the post-apocalyptic scenario [...]. Eventually, after several conflicts on the Web and in the office, Felix and his partner Van set out to see what’s still salvageable in the outdoor world and if they can fix it as well as they’ve tried to fix the Web.[4]

RDE, finishing, 8Jan21